Prove It

Imagine, if you can, a novel that imbues pot roast, green beans and scalloped potatoes with Gnostic import — not just evoking the aroma of Sundays past, with their “old orderliness, aloof from all disruption,” as in Marilynne Robinson’s last novel, “Home,” but embodying specific doctrinal precepts and divine mysteries. Reason recoils. Yet, in the philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s latest work of fiction, “36 Arguments for the Existence of God,” the rotund and orotund Jonas Elijah Klapper, the “Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature and Values” at Frankfurter University (think of Brandeis), proposes the traditional Jewish Sabbath meal of cholent (bean and potato stew) and kugel (pudding) to his overawed grad student, Cass Seltzer, as a worthy dissertation topic. And he’s not kidding. “All of the dishes have kabbalist significance,” he tells Seltzer. “The tzaddikim, or righteous ones, proclaimed that there are profound matters enfolded in the kugel.”

Klapper, a “Jewish walrus in a shabby tweed jacket” and the author of “The Perversity of Persuasion,” among other master­pieces, is given to staring upward as he orates, letting “the riches of his prodigious memory” spill forth. He is evidently a caricature of Harold Bloom or someone uncannily like him. He is also, Seltzer regretfully concludes, “going off the deep end.”

Only a year into his Ph.D. program, Seltzer watched his guru throw over Matthew Arnold for Yahweh, trading the ethereal embrace of academe for the meaty bear hug of his Hasidic brethren at “America’s only shtetl,” an upstate New York community called New Walden. Named for the town of Valden, in Hungary, New Walden happens to be the place where Seltzer’s mother grew up. She left the village and raised her family in a non-kosher, non-Sabbath-observing home, but Klapper persuades Seltzer to rekindle his Valdener ties and wrangle an invitation to a members-only feast at the rebbe’s table. It is after this memorable meal that Klapper orders his disciple to explore “God’s indwelling immanence” through the “intriguing mystery of the kugel.” Seltzer balks. “There’s no way I’m writing a dissertation on the hermeneutics of potato kugel,” he protests.

This faith-fed food fight leads him to break with Klapper and dig his own rut as a psychology of religion professor at Frankfurter, where he is ignored by the faculty for more than a decade. But in the wake of Sept. 11, as “religion as a phenomenon” emerges in the public imagination, Setlzer writes a book that shows “how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience.” He calls the book “The Varieties of Religious Illusion,” a nod to William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience.” Lanky and boyish at 42, he earns a spot on the best-seller list, a starring role in a Time cover story on “The New Atheists” and an offer from Harvard. Wealth, fame and job security are his; now all he needs is love. His ex-wife, a cruel, “lupine” French poet, left him for a one-legged neurologist, and his new girlfriend, Lucinda, a brittle, competitive game theorist, is out of town. Does Lucinda love him? He comes up with a probability chart to help him guess. A daisy would do as well.

Photo

Rebecca Newberger GoldsteinCredit
Steven Pinker

Seltzer’s rebellions — rejecting Orthodox Judaism, shrugging off the influence of a controlling mentor, and coming up with a theory for the meaning of life and love that excludes supernatural agency — mirror Goldstein’s own. These preoccupations recur throughout her work. In her 1983 novel “The Mind-Body Problem,” she wrote of a dishy lapsed Modern Orthodox Jewish philosophy student who ditched faith for scholarship, then tried to acquire genius by marrying one. In her splendid 1995 novel “Mazel,” she enfolded the stories of a Jewish grandmother, daughter and granddaughter with different attitudes toward Old World tradition (it’s the grandma who’s the free spirit). Even in her nonfiction, like “Betraying Spinoza” (2006), a study of the famous philosopher who was ejected from Amsterdam’s Jewish community for his heretical views, she merged her personal history with her idol’s. Now almost 60, Goldstein remains fascinated by the codes and beliefs she absorbed in her Orthodox girlhood and continues to transmit her defiance and doubts to her characters.

Seltzer’s best seller (like Goldstein’s novel) comes with an appendix that lists and refutes 36 arguments for the existence of God, “formally constructed in the preferred analytic style.” In that appendix, Seltzer conducts the exercise that William James called “the darling dream of philosophic dogmatists”: devising reliable “tests for truth” about the nature of God and the universe. To taste their rigor, sample No. 20, the Argument From the Intolerability of Insignificance, which travels from Premise 1 (“In a million years, nothing that happens now will matter”) to Premise 4 (“It is intolerable . . . that in a million years nothing that happens now will matter”) to Premise 8 (“God exists”). Seltzer dismisses this argument as “the fallacy of wishful thinking.” Or consider No. 27, the Argument From the Upward Curve of History, which begins “There is an upward moral curve to human history” and ends “God exists.” Here, Seltzer strangely fails to avail himself of the most obvious refutation: If there’s an upward moral curve to human history, how do we explain the emergence of reality TV?

But the lay reader need not quail; Goldstein’s lofty psycho-religio-philosophical subtext, or rather metatext, doesn’t gray her roman à clef about love, Jewish cultural identity and academic infighting. She sews her philosophical inquiry to the material of everyday life. For instance, why has Seltzer’s ex-girlfriend Roz popped up at Frankfurter all of a sudden? All the same, the stitches that join Goldstein’s men, women and themes show more in this novel than they do in her others. The chronology floats back and forth across two decades according to no particular scheme; some characters are less developed than others; and the insertion of e-mail correspondence and inside jokes can strike the reader as unhelpfully random. Curiously, for a novel that asserts the irrelevance of God, the unifying thread that knots all the pieces together, however loosely, is Orthodox Judaism.

Early on, when he was still under Klapper’s spell and dating Roz, a budding “warrior anthropologist,” Seltzer let her accompany him on a visit to New Walden. Her point of view — personal, intellectual, Jewish and gendered — flavored his. To Roz, the massive synagogue looked “like a Costco that had found God.” Seeing the Valdener womenfolk scurry through sex-segregated streets, Roz felt “pique over the Hasidic attitude toward women.” Nonetheless, when she and Seltzer met Azarya, the golden-tressed boy slated to be the next Valdener rebbe, they felt themselves in the presence of a genius whose existence lay “outside of natural psychological processes” — itself a proof of God (the 28th in Seltzer’s appendix). As the boy grows up, Seltzer wishes he’d been chosen by M.I.T alone, not by God. Yet Azarya knows that New Walden’s survival depends on him. “Human under­standing will continue without Azarya Sheiner,” he tells Seltzer. “The Valdeners are a different story.” Seltzer presses him: “Why should the Valdeners continue with their superstitions and their insularity and their stubborn refusal to learn anything from outside? Why is that something to perpetuate?” You might as well ask why serve cholent and kugel on the Sabbath.

In “36 Arguments for the Existence of God,” Goldstein shows that philosophers and scholars may construct as many proofs or disproofs of divinity as they like. But to people of faith such questions remain as inarguable as the persistence of kugel.

36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

A Work of Fiction

By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

402 pp. Pantheon Books. $27.95

Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

A version of this review appears in print on January 31, 2010, on Page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Prove It. Today's Paper|Subscribe